Review: 'Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life' Is Full of Heartbreak, Laughter, and Surprise

Happy Gilmore Month! On November 25, our favorite mother-daughter duo returns in Netflix's Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. To celebrate, we're counting down until the binge-fest begins, revisiting the show's best moments, debating Rory's boyfriends, and going all-out Gilmore every day for 25 days. Here, a review of the new season (!!!) ahead of the official release. Here's what you have to look forward to:

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There were a lot of reasons to be nervous about the Gilmore Girls revival. Small-screen reboots over the last year have been abundant―and disappointing (a moment of silence for Heroes Reborn, The X-Files, Fuller House et al)―and for Stars Hollow devotees, the stakes are high. The show ended unceremoniously in 2007, on an uneven season that many fans choose to ignore entirely thanks to the absence of creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.

But A Year In The Life meets expectations and then some. This quartet of 90-minute episodes is a rich, lovingly crafted pleasure, retaining the original show's lightness of touch while making the most of the breadth and depth afforded by its new Netflix format. There's some stiffness to the opening scenes of first episode 'Winter,' which finds Rory (Alexis Bledel) back in Stars Hollow for a rare whistle-stop visit to Lorelai (Lauren Graham) before she catches her next red-eye flight to London.

But it doesn't take long for the show to get back into its familiar motormouthed groove, with writing duties on the four episodes spilt between Sherman-Palladino and her longtime writing partner Daniel Palladino. The saddest thing about season seven was watching these actors play what felt like pale imitations of their characters – cast members have described it as "like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers" – and though a decade has passed on-screen and off, these are absolutely the characters you know and love, only older and less sure of themselves.

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Rory's living a frenetic and seemingly successful life as a freelance journalist, racking up bylines in The New Yorker and The Atlantic in between globetrotting and book proposals – but beneath the bravado, she's struggling. Over the course of the first two episodes it becomes clear that she's in deep denial about everything from her career prospects to her surprisingly messy personal life, and that the sense of entitlement she increasingly displayed growing up wasn't a phase, but a character trait.

"Life has been pretty good to you so far – it was time for a few curveballs," Lorelai points out, but Rory doesn't see it, still expecting the world to hand her everything if she tries a little. On Netflix, Rory is free to be closer to an anti-hero than she ever was on the WB, but even in her most selfish moments here it's clear she's moving in the right direction.

Though the mile-a-minute banter and pop culture obsessions are still firmly intact, Lorelai isn't as breezy as she used to be either, with Graham giving a more brittle and vulnerable performance. The death of Gilmore patriarch Richard, prompted by the real-life passing of actor Edward Hermann, is still recent and very raw. Early in 'Winter' there's a 15-minute sequence set on the night of Richard's funeral that is nothing like the comfort viewing Gilmore Girls is known for; it's emotionally ragged and hard to watch. Though the conflict between Lorelai and her parents ran throughout the show, it comes to a head like never before here in an ugly, long-festering fight between Lorelai and Emily (Kelly Bishop) that goes as deep as it does because it no longer has to be sanitized for network television.

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In the wake of her father's death Lorelai is "feeling her mortality" and reevaluating everything, including her now nine-year relationship with Luke (Scott Patterson), and the fact that they're living together but, to Emily's disapproval, not married. Meanwhile Emily herself is adrift, having been defined by being Richard's wife for 50 years – in trying to purge her life of the things that don't make her happy, she realizes she has no idea what does.

With three generations of Gilmore women in crisis, the 90-minute format still allows room for the larger ensemble to breathe. The standout supporting player is Paris (Liza Weil), whose return combines some of the revival's most laugh-out-loud moments and some of its most unexpected sadness. There's also affectionate attention played to Kirk (Sean Gunn), whose eccentricity now comes with a pet pig; and Michel (Yanic Truesdale), who gets the kind of development here he rarely did in the show.

The once-throwback town of Stars Hollow has now been dragged into the 21st century in more ways than one – the oft-noted lack of LGBT representation is openly referenced in a town meeting, but not before it's remedied, in an entirely organic way that will make any fan beam. Luke's Diner is now overrun by wifi-hungry laptop users, and the pop culture references are naturally up-to-the-minute, encompassing everything from Spotlight to Lena Dunham to an extended riff on Cheryl Strayed's Wild.

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Gilmore Girls was always a slice-of-life show above all, episodes rarely ending on a neat thematic climax, and by the same token very little is neatly wrapped up by the end of the final episode 'Fall'. But the last half hour is still delightful on too many levels to count – a too-brief but touching appearance from Melissa McCarthy's Sookie, a very specific musical callback for a beloved couple, and of course those infamous final four words.

Despite being released all at once in the Netflix tradition, Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life is a series of vignettes that doesn't necessarily lend itself to binge-viewing, not that most fans will be able to resist. What it does is keep you on your toes throughout; there are false starts and coy visual reveals, threads are left hanging in unexpected ways, and there's firm closure only for one of Rory's Big Three relationships. And the major conflict between Rory and Lorelai which emerges during the third episode, 'Summer,' is complex and knotty and deeply rooted in the entire history of the show, demonstrating how well these writers still know these characters.

Packed though it is with fan service, in-jokes, surprise cameos, and appearances from just about every single member of the ensemble, the season has its priorities straight. Rather than coasting by on goodwill or rehashing familiar beats, the Palladinos do something new with every major character, making a potent emotional case for why we needed this year back in Stars Hollow.

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